Fair Hypocrites: Twilight By Way of Pamela

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Whatever your feelings about Twilight, you have to admit that the breadth and scope of the Twilight phenomenon is spectacular. Boy wizards aside, literature-inspired hoo-ha of this magnitude just doesn’t come along that often. To begin with, there is the dizzying array of memorabilia: Twilight band-aids, duvet covers, water bottles, umbrellas, jewelry, wallets, life-sized wall decals, as well as the standard t-shirts and movie posters. Kristen Stewart, the actress who plays Twilight heroine Bella Swan in the film adaptations, has expressed astonishment that rather mundane items of clothing she’s spotted wearing sell out in hours. There’s a Twilight make-up line that includes a pinkish gold-flecked lotion that promises to give “Twihards,” and anyone else, vampirically luminous skin (according to the editors of Lucky Magazine, “it’s gleamy but not over-the-top-Edward-in-sunlight-sparkly”). And that’s not to mention the Twilight fan blogs (oh, TwilightMomsBlog!) and the legions of YouTube videos posted by less satisfied Twilight readers burning, beating, and taking chainsaws to their copies of the best-selling novels (Breaking Dawn, the fourth and last book in the series, sold 1.3 million copies in the first day; total sales of all of the books are at upwards of 40 million, and since the final installment came out last year, all four books in the series have remained in USA Today’s top 10 bestsellers). And then there are the sell-out midnight shows whose fangirl audiences reportedly squeal with delight when the lights dim. The father of one of these fans told me that his 14-year-old daughter had taken to signing her text and email messages “Twilight,” instead of her name.

The books have also had a startling effect on the small town of Forks, Washington, the setting of Meyer’s series. Tourism has been booming. Last year, the mayor of Forks declared the weekend of September 12-13th to be Stephenie Meyer Day Weekend (September 12th is Bella Swan’s birthday). This year, the weekend’s events include a birthday breakfast for Bella, tours of Forks High School (where Bella was supposed to have been a student), a Twilight character look alike contest, and a sunset bonfire at the Quileute Reservation, on the same beach where, in the novels, Bella meets Jacob Black, a Quileute teenager, who becomes her best friend, a werewolf, and the rival of the beautiful teenage vampire Edward Cullen for Bella’s affections. By all accounts, this year’s celebration was a massive success, nearly doubling Forks’ population of somewhere around 3,000 and drawing visitors from as far away as England and Japan.

Marveling at all this on the eve of the second Twilight movie’s release, I found myself thinking of Samuel Richardson‘s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Pamela, published in 1740, was the first best-selling novel in English; it is the story of a teenage servant girl who resists her aristocratic master’s increasingly violent sexual overtures, eventually wins his heart and becomes his wife. It was the first novel to inspire the sort of frenzy that Twilight is inspiring right now. Like Twilight, Pamela spawned themed merchandise: Pamela tea cups and tea towels, Pamela prints and painting, Pamela fans, Pamela playing cards. Pastors recommended the book from the pulpit and European intellectuals as well as private citizens sang its praises. Rousseau, for one, reported weeping copiously over it. There wasn’t any declaration of a Pamela Day, but one famous and oft-repeated anecdote about the Pamela mania verges into the kind of confusing of the fictional and the real that the Forks’ Twilight celebrations offer. There are many anecdotes dating back to the eighteenth century, in which Pamela’s wedding is taken as fact or publicly celebrated. In one of the best known, from an 1833 address given by Sir John Herschel at Eton, a blacksmith in a small village in Windsor got hold of a copy of Pamela

and used to read it aloud in the long summer evenings, seated on his anvil, and never failed to have a large and attentive audience…At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved rules—the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout and, procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing.

These readers were practicing the English custom of ringing church bells to celebrate and announce a marriage–though in this case, the marriage of a fictional hero and heroine: Pamela and her former master, the landed squire named Mr. B.

Pamela was revolutionary in its day and Richardson was both celebrated (as by the Windsor townsfolk) and reviled for the novel’s “leveling” tendency. Servants and common laborers were widely considered a lesser order of being in the eighteenth century—there to serve the pleasure of their masters, whatever that pleasure might be. The idea of a titled landowner marrying his maid—when he might sleep with her with impunity—was considered scandalous and subversive, to say the least. Historian Lynn Hunt‘s recent book, Inventing Human Rights, claims that novels like Pamela were foundational in the development of the idea of human rights that surfaced explicitly in the French and American Revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

On the surface, then, it would seem that the similarity between Twilight and Pamela, between Bella and Pamela, ends in their popularity and the mania they inspire(d). But these twin phenomena, one sitting at each end of the history of the novel, I think, share more. By an admittedly cynical and reductive reading, Twilight and Pamela are the same book, the same archetypal female fantasy: a poor or undistinguished girl is chosen as “the one” by a handsome, rich, aristocratic man who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her (more or less) grubby, mundane, low-born life. And the cynical reading goes further. These are not merely Cinderella love stories; in fact, they are not love stories at all. By the cynical reading, these novels are only about class, about becoming rich, becoming one of the rarefied beautiful people.

A year after Pamela‘s publication, Henry Fielding published Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s novel motivated by the belief that Pamela didn’t resist her master’s attempts to rape her out of fear or a moral certainty that her desires were just as important as his, but because she thought she might get more out of him if she held out. Fielding’s sham Pamela is a hypocrite, a wily girl on the make—after money, finery, and social position that she was not entitled to by birth or by her incredible virtuousness (which Fielding tells us is only a ruse designed to ensnare Mr. B, her master.). Pamela protests too much on Fielding’s reading: he suggested that Pamela’s belaboring of the spiritual peril that Mr. B’s advances threaten her with, combined with her obvious attraction to him, didn’t quite ring true.

In Pamela’s case, I think Fielding goes too far. A marriage to a landed, titled man would have been quite literally beyond the wildest dreams of a servant like Pamela, even assuming that she possessed the sort of calculating wiliness that Fielding attributes to her. In fact, if she were as wily as Fielding drew her, Shamela would have known that she’d never become Mr. B’s bride. (Only by the rules of Richardson’s quasi-allegorical plot can Pamela’s virtue be rewarded as it is.) But in the case of Meyer’s Bella Swan, I think Fielding’s hypocrisy reading might stand. Like Pamela (and Pamela is more convincing), Bella insists that what she values, particularly in her beloved vampire Edward, is spiritual: “Edward had the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body,” she tells us.

But why, if the spiritual is supposed to be paramount, are the Twilight novels so distractingly full of money – literally, piles of cash – and the things money can buy? “There was enough cash stashed all over the house to keep a small country afloat for a decade,” Bella reports of the Cullen family home. This cash buys Bella an acceptance to Dartmouth, a special order Mercedes (a model preferred by drug dealers and diplomats for its bulletproof glass—Edward’s very protective), a Ferrari, lots and lots of couture clothing, and a faux rustic cottage in the woods that I came to think of as a version of Marie Antoinette’s hameau (the little faux farmhouse where the queen and her ladies played at being peasants). All of this, Bella claims to resent or to feel uncomfortable accepting.

But the idea that the Cullen wealth holds no appeal to Bella, when it is Bella herself who draws so much attention to it in her first-person narration, just doesn’t stand. When, at the end of the fourth book, she finally admits a little pleasure in the jaw-dropping, head-turning spectacle that this wealth allows her to become, it feels like she is finally admitting what she’s felt and wanted all along—a pleasure that anyone, most especially a teenage girl, would feel:

He took the calf-length ivory trench coat I’d worn to disguise the fact that I was wearing Alice’s idea of appropriate attire, and gasped quietly at my oyster satin cocktail gown. I still wasn’t used to being beautiful to everyone rather than just Edward. The maitre d’ stuttered half-formed compliments as he backed unsteadily from the room.

Of course, the idea here is that it’s (spoiler alert) Bella’s newly enhanced physical beauty that stuns the man (she’s become a vampire at this point, and vampires are more beautiful in order to attract their prey, i.e. humans), but Meyer/Bella lingers on the clothes—the things money can buy.

Bella’s compulsive observation of the Cullens’ beauty and their beautiful things does not come to seem a metaphor for spiritual superiority but a conflation of material wealth, physical beauty, and moral elevation. While the books suppose to be about a perfect, otherworldly love (this love could be metaphor: it certainly doesn’t exist in the real world), the material intrudes constantly (cars, money, clothes), suggesting that beauty and money and blessedness and happiness are all one, confused and interchangeable.

This pernicious lie that is at the heart of Twilight. When I see pictures of young girls waiting in line to buy these novels or tickets to the movie, this is why I get angry. I don’t get angry because Meyer’s recycled the classic female fantasy of the most desirable boy picking the girl he never will in real life (I love My So-Called Life, while knowing all too well that Angela Chase (Clare Danes) would never have gotten Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) in “real” life), I get angry because Meyer didn’t seem to trust the unbelievable love between Bella and Edward as sufficient to hold her readers’ interest. Love, apparently, needs to be tarted up in designer clothes, given sparkling six-pack abs, armed with platinum credit cards and Ferraris before we’ll recognize it. For all of its heavy-handed allusions to Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights, Twilight is, in the end, fatally invested in the shallow materialism and the youth and beauty worship that continue to define and corrode American popular culture.

Emily Colette Wilkinson
is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

On an August 2013 episode of The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast, author Donald Antrim read and discussed Denis Johnson’s short story “Work.” Antrim said he remembered the liberation he associated with reading the story when it was published in The New Yorker in 1988: “At the time, I was trying to write stories myself, but they were somewhat dead and I think I felt a little lost…I think reading Denis Johnson had to have something to do with a sense of permission, a sense of freedom to do something that I didn’t understand fully and didn’t know how to imagine or envision.”

Antrim’s revelatory experience of reading the stories in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son – a linked collection that follows the drug-addled wanderings of a narrator known as “Fuckhead” — is far from unique. In 2012, Illustrator Jane Mount compiled My Ideal Bookshelf, a collection in which 100 contemporary cultural figures shared the books that mattered to them most. Jesus’ Son was tied alongside James Joyce’sUlysses as the third most selected book. They both only trailed behind Vladimir Nabokov’sLolita, and Herman Melville’sMoby Dick.

On The New Yorker podcast, Antrim goes on to describe some of the unusual techniques in Jesus’ Son that have rattled so many readers and writers. Antrim notes the clipped and disoriented structure to many of the stories and scenes. He remarks on the speed of the narrative transitions. He says that there’s “an incoherence in the thought process that actually has a coherence.”

Then, as is the case on each episode of the podcast, Antrim reads the selected story: “I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.” Antrim proceeds through a story in which the narrator and his friend Wayne go to rip copper wire from an abandoned house. Then Wayne visits his wife while Fuckhead waits in the car. Then they go to the bar where they spend all the money they just made scrapping the copper wire. The story ends with Fuckhead gawking at the angelic bartender. “I’ll never forget you,” he thinks. “Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman tells Donald Antrim about how she recently interviewed Denis Johnson at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She says, “I asked him about this book, about Jesus’ Son…he’s quite dismissive of it when he talks about it now, and he said it’s just a rip-off of Isaac Babel’sRed Cavalry…” Antrim says that he’s never read Red Cavalry, and the discussion of Jesus’ Son, on its own terms, continues on.

But what does Denis Johnson mean by calling his most iconic book a “rip-off” of Red Cavalry — a classic of early 20th-century Russian literature? Johnson’s book features a ragtag cast of addicts in rural America, engaged in efforts of drug procurement and petty crime that almost always go wrong. Red Cavalry, on the other hand, features the title army during the Russian-Polish campaign, the Soviets’ first military effort toward spreading Communism to the rest of Europe. In terms of locations and circumstances, the books are radically different. But, on closer look, they actually do share a lot in common.

“The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head,” Babel writes in the opening story of Red Cavalry (as translated by Peter Constantine). “The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.”

In an introduction to Red Cavalry, Michael Dirda writes, “Violence and brutality mingle with a surreal, sometimes poetic beauty…This juxtaposition of an elevated literary style with coarse soldier’s talk, of strikingly original analogy with harsh naturalistic observation, lies at the heart of Babel’s achievement. In every way the stories yoke together opposites.”

Jesus’ Son actually works with a similar set of tools. “The sky is blue and the dead are coming back,” Johnson writes. “Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breast.”
Using “elevated literary style” alongside “harsh naturalistic observation,” both writers convey haunting and brutal landscapes. Babel: “Stars slithered out of the cool gut of the sky, and on the horizon abandoned villages flared up. With my saddle on my shoulders, I walked along a torn-up field path…” Johnson: “There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground…”

Both books feature frequent and intense poetic violence. Babel writes of Dolgushov who lies in the mud with his exposed heart beating and his intestines spilling out. “[He] placed his blue palms on the ground and looked at his hands in disbelief.” Johnson writes of McInnes, who’s been shot in the stomach and is dying in the backseat of a car. “[He] was white and sick, holding himself tenderly.”

Both writers seem to be geniuses of metaphors on the sky. Babel: “The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.” Johnson: “The sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge.”

What gets quickly lost when I put particular sections side-by-side like this is how radically different each book still really is. In a Red Cavalry story, a young Jewish soldier will accost an old woman and murder her goose to prove he’s not an intellectual sissy. In a Jesus’ Son story, a drugged-out hospital orderly will try to save a litter of “bunnies” in the desert to prove he’s not a fuck-up. “It’s a name that’s going to stick,” his friend Georgie tells him after he sits on and kills the rabbits. “‘Fuckhead’ is gonna ride you to your grave.”

Considerable narrative overlaps between the two books also exist, but they tend to be circumstances that are realized in newly distorted ways.

In one Red Cavalry story, the narrator transcribes another soldier’s letter home about, among other things, his brother Fyodorovna being “hacked” to pieces. “I wrote it down without embellishing it,” the narrator says, “and am recording it here word for word.” In Johnson’s “Steady Hands at Seattle General,” the narrator carefully shaves the face of another man in rehab, while that man tells him the story of each of his scars. “Are you going to change any of this for your poem?” he asks. “No,” the narrator says, “It’s going in word for word.”

Babel’s “Ivan and Ivan” and Johnson’s “Two Men” both feature men hitching rides who are perceived-to-be-faking deafness. Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov shouts, “Are you deaf, Father Deacon, or not?” Fuckhead says, “Look…I know you can talk. Don’t act like we’re stupid.”

“What sort of person is our Cossack?” Babel wrote in his 1920 Diary. “Many-layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty.” He stops, and then writes, “Omit the ‘revolutionary spirit.’” The same things might be said of Fuckhead. In “Out On Bail,” he steals and cashes Social Security checks from a dead tenant’s apartment, but he says he’s always believing he should be finding an honest way to make a few dollars, always believing he’s “an honest person who shouldn’t be doing things like that.” In “Dirty Wedding,” he mourns the death of his ex-girlfriend Michelle, who he once abandoned at the abortion clinic for a hooker at the Savoy Hotel: “[Michelle] was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.”

One of the more pronounced elements of both books is their narrative messiness. In TheNew York Times book review of Jesus’ Son, James McManus wrote, “The narrator’s inability to construct a ‘well-made’ story, or even to keep the facts of his life straight, expressively parallels the rest of his dysfunctional behavior.” McManus is talking about how Jack Hotel dies of a heroin overdose at the end of “Out on Bail,” and how, in the next story, Hotel returns, smokes hashish, and remarks, “I wouldn’t mind working as a hit man,” as McInnis bleeds out in the back of the car. An early story in the collection is titled “Two Men.” Later in the book, in “The Other Man”, the narrator begins: “But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one…”

In “Emergency” — the prescription-pill-loaded narrator — undermining the entire story he had been telling up until that point — stops and reflects, “Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them.” He decides, “It doesn’t matter. What’s important for me to remember is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up.” In the final pages of the story, the narrative logistics turn impossible. Fuckhead and Georgie return to the hospital, possibly the same day they left. Then the narrator remembers how, just hours earlier, they had picked up their AWOL friend, Hardee, and how Georgie swore he’d get him across the border: “I think I know some people,” Georgie said to him. “Don’t worry. You’re on your way to Canada.”

Red Cavalry — in oftentimes strange and beautiful ways — is also haphazardly constructed. In “The Story Of A Horse,” Khlebnikov, a self-proclaimed white-stallion enthusiast, fails to reclaim his horse from Savitsky. Khlebnikov spends several days crying and writing a petition for his horse on a tree stump. At the end of the story, he’s discharged from the army as an “invalid” for his poor health and battle wounds. Ten stories later, in “The Continuation of the Story of a Horse,” the narrator reminds the reader of the disagreement between Khlebnikov and Savitsky, then transcribes a pair of no-hard-feelings correspondences between them; the horse only receives a brief and fairly inconsequential mention. “Thirty days I have been fighting in the rear guard, covering the retreat of the invincible First Red Cavalry and facing powerful gunfire from airplanes and artillery,” Savitsky writes to Khlebnikov. “Tardy was killed, Likhmanikov was killed, Gulevoy was killed, Trunov was killed, and the white stallion is no longer under me, so with the changes in our fortunes of warm Comrade Khlebnikov, do not expect to see your beloved Division Commander Savitsky ever again.”

In another story, the same vivid and incredibly specific metaphor shows up twice: “Trunov had already been wounded in the head that morning. His head was bandaged with a rag, and blood trickled from it like rain from a haystack,” the narrator reports early in the tale. Later he says, “At that moment I saw Trunov creeping out from behind a mound. Blood was trickling from his head like rain from a haystack and the dirty rag had come undone and was hanging down.”

Babel was an active soldier in the Red Cavalry army while he was writing many of his stories. The dangerous and dismal conditions under which the material was gained likely made smooth story construction quite difficult, even if that ever was an ambition. “Under machine gun fire, bullets shriek, a dreadful sensation, we creep along through the trenches,” Babel wrote in his 1920 Diary. “Some Red Army fighter is panicking, and, of course, we are surrounded.” Similar to what McManus describes in his review of Jesus’ Son, in Red Cavalry it’s also fitting that tales are so surreal and fractured. Johnson, meanwhile, was originally writing Jesus’ Son as a piece of memoir. He said, “Originally, in fact, I wasn’t even going to publish it. But then I added a lot of things that never happened to me, though almost everything in there actually happened to someone I know or heard about.”

The conditions under which the books were written share another important similarity: both were written with a sort of wild-eyed desperation. Babel joined the army, on the advice of his mentor, Maxim Gorky, to find material for his writing in the hopes of getting published. “My birthday,” Babel wrote in one of his early journal entries, “Twenty-six years old. I think of home, of my work, my life is flying past. No manuscripts. Dull misery.” In 1990, Johnson after a rough stretch and a rocky conclusion to his second marriage, owed $10,000 in taxes. He called his editor at FSG: “I told him, ‘I’ll make you a book of short stories; all you have to do is pay off the IRS.’”

Jesus’ Son vaulted to a cult popularity among contemporary readers and writers that’s hard for many other individual story collections to measure up against. Maybe Flannery O’Connor achieves a similar level of cultural cachet with A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Maybe Ernest Hemingway does with In Our Time. Jesus’ Son, though, was the collection chosen more frequently than any other in Jane Mount’s My Ideal Bookshelf. Similarly, on The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast, Denis Johnson has been the most selected writer — three times with all three stories from Jesus’ Son. On a 2009 episode, before Tobias Wolff read “Emergency,” Deborah Treisman laughed and said, “I’ve had three other writers ask to do this very story while I put it on hold for you.”

Is what Denis Johnson said true, though? Is Jesus’ Son just a “rip-off” of Red Cavalry? “Rip-off” seems to be the wrong word. It borrows heavily, yes, but it seems to me Jesus’ Son is less a “rip-off” of Red Cavalry than West Side Story is a “rip-off” of Romeo and Juliet. Or, in keeping with the Johnson-Babel theme of stark and brutal poetry, Jesus’ Son is less a “rip-off” of Red Cavalry than Apocalypse Now is of Heart of Darkness. With any of these works, even adaptation or re-creation seem to not entirely be the right words; in each case, the follow-up deviates wildly from what might be considered its source material. In Jesus’ Son, the stories and execution certainly have a lot in common with Red Cavalry and — in considering them closely — it seems right for Johnson to acknowledge his debt. But do the similarities diminish any of the virtues of either book? Even more than in the case of the most liberal of re-creations, adaptations, or “rip-offs,” it seems to me that each book is still its own radical thing.

After Treisman tells Antrim, on the 2013 podcast, that today Johnson is dismissive of the stories in Jesus’ Son, Antrim says, “Well, he has his own attitude about what he did a long time ago. I have a tendency to write things off after 20 years, too. I’m not a particularly good judge of what I do. Maybe he’s not a particularly good judge, over time, of what he’s done.” Antrim pauses in thought, and then adds, “And that’s probably as it should be.”

16 comments:

This is probably the most words I’ve ever read about this Twilight phenomenon that is everywhere. I’ve been pretty good at ignoring it. But this piece was really fabulous. It makes me want to go back and reread Pamela.

I find it interesting, as a huge Harry Potter fan, that that series has an undercurrent of precisely the opposite–the triumph of love and friendship over all things material and wealthy.

Though I understand Emily’s concern over this latest literary phenomenon, this type of literature needs to be included (and based on its popularity, won’t be denied) for it opens up issues for discussion as she’s related in her article.

Having read Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Shamela, Burney’s Evelina, Brooke’s Excursion…, I concur with Emily’s comparisons. But I do think she may be giving the Twilight series too much credit for molding the minds, values and aspirations of today’s young women. Unlike the women of the 18th century, today’s young women are not encased in the domestic sphere; their world is universal and eclectic. In addition, parents, other family members and friends can be, and often are, significant in helping to mold their perceptions.

I have a 14 year old daughter who is crazy about Twilight; to attempt to deny her access to the literature, movies, etc. would be futile. What I am doing is using the books as a platform for discussion with her, pointing out the fictional qualities of the story, it’s shortcomings, as well as it’s strengths. The character of Bella is definitely not the ideal I want my daughter to aspire to; she is submissive to the point of ridiculousness, willing subjects herself to the whims/domination/abuse (albeit fantasized) of males in the story, and seems to have no mind of her own. Hence, in our discussions, I clearly and repeatedly (though not to the point of lecturing) point out her foibles as well as my daughter’s strengths. My job is not to deny my daughter access to the world, but help her learn how to filter out the myths and cherish the truths.

Young and mature women alike enjoy romance stories, beautiful men, flattering clothes, that’s a given. But while we mature women have already formed our identities, our daughters’ are still being defined. It is important we focus on being their trusted guides and compassionate, caring supporters in their progress.

When I’ve asked my daughter what she enjoys most about the Twilight story, the answer is always the same, “the love story, the hot guys” :-) That’s the answer I would expect. Based on her responses to our discussions, she understands the difference between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality.

As an author, Stephanie Meyers may not be of the literary quality lit. majors are used to, but she is definitely having an influence on this generation of young women. For better or worse, her work is here to stay. By making her work an open platform for discussion, we can empower young women, not necessarily in the manner Meyers intended, but through our own unique vision.

I admit, with some shame now, at being a firm Twilight fan. Before reading this piece, I admired Meyer’s series for the narrator’s humility, and the seemingly unlikely love between Bella and Edward, as you mentioned. But now, after having all of the materialism in the Twilight series pointed out, it’s difficult to ignore. Perhaps on a subconcious level the money and materialism is what actually appealed to me, and to so many readers like me. I had read Bella’s delight in her own appearance in Breaking Dawn as her finally appreciating herself, instead of constantly lamenting her flaws. However, Bella’s self-acceptance only comes after being transformed into a supernaturally-beautiful creature, and then dressed in expensive designer clothing. What kind of message is that sending to the easily-influenced teen masses? It sets a standard that is impossible and cruelly unattainable. I’m kind of disappointed in myself.

I wouldn’t and don’t deny the presence or the appeal of the Twilight books–I can’t in the face of millions of books and movie tickets sold. There is an undeniable appeal: To be worshipfully adored and attended to and celebrated as Edward, in all of his wealth and beauty and his many talents, adores, attends to, and celebrates Bella would be wonderful. But this just doesn’t happen in real life: Edwards, like vampires, don’t exist, so “cruelly unattainable” is right. The “real life” version of Meyer’s fantasy man would be creepy, stalkerish, unwholesomely possessive (and some might say that he is in her fantasy version).

Bella herself, particularly in New Moon, is a textbook example of morbidly low self-esteem and codependency. Her sense of self is wholly and entirely defined by Edward: she has no sense of self or worth or value beyond him. I believe Bella says something to the effect of “he’s like a drug to me.” And he is. I found Edward and Bella’s relationship deeply disturbing because of this. (And that’s not even touching on Bella’s masochism and her quasi-anorexia.)

I hope, Julie, that all teenage girls who are reading Twilight have parents who understand how problematic and deceptive most of it is–not just its tacit celebration of materialism. But I sort of imagine that you’re somewhat exceptional.

Your article gets right at the heart of what I’ve always hated about Twilight. It’s not the lack of literary value, and it’s not even the rehashing of the poor girl gets rich guy love story — it’s the conflation of true love and good self-image with materialism and outward appearance!

If parents used Twilight to discuss emotional abuse, dangerous materialism, positive self-image, and the lure of outward appearances, I would be all for using it… as the bad example. However, I suspect that parents using these books as a springboard for this kind of discussion is quite rare.

This is one of the most fascinating essays I’ve seen about the whole Twilight phenomenon. I read *Pamela* as an undergrad but I didn’t know all of that historical detail about its popularity. What a neat bit of perspective on cultural manias! I completely agree about the materialism. This seems to be part of current vampire genre convention, however–it seems that vampires, individually or in the collective, are always stinking with money. Whether they flaunt it or not is less consistent, but wealth–presumably based on the ability to invest over centuries, like the Rothschilds, I suppose–is almost a given. But I can’t throw stones at that glass house since it applies to my fiction, as well!

I’m in the midst of writing a longer critical piece on vampires and, yes, the vampire has always been–and continues to be–a creature inevitably associated with money. The first reference to vampires in English, a London newspaper story from the 1730’s about a Hungarian man who rose from the dead and killed several people by sucking out their blood, was considered by the only English critic who analyzed the account in any detail to be an allegory about the exploitation of the poor by the rich (the man who was supposed to have become a vampire had been a tax collector in life). And one of the most famous academic articles on Dracula, Franco Moretti’s “A Capital Dracula,” reads Stoker’s most famous vampire (quite convincingly) as a symbol of capitalism. And of course Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse books and, I gather, your Vampires of New England, all keep to this pattern.

You can see my other posts for the Millions through the Contributors link on our homepage. I also write reviews for the Virginia Quarterly and the Washington Times. Right now, I’m working on a longer piece about ethical vampires for VQR that will focus mainly on Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse books and I’ll be sure to link to that once it’s available. Thanks for reading! Emily

Great article! I, like a previous commenter, am a big Twilight fan and a little embarrassed to admit it now. In my own defense, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with these books because I recognized the co-dependency of the Bella and how dangerous that can be to teenage girls to have that kind of role model. What has inspired me to comment, however, is a desire to point out that the Twilight books are a product of our society’s values. Stephenie Meyer has not spawned the notion that money and beauty and power bring happiness as you suggest, but she is merely reflecting what our culture already valued. While I agree with everything you said, I think you give Stephenie Meyer too much credit – she did not originate the ideas that makes you so angry – those values were already present in our culture before the Twilight phenomena.

There are a lot of things that bother me about Twilight, but I think I’ll be the first poster here to say that I’m not bothered at all by Stephanie Meyer’s treatment of money. She very clearly intends Edward to be an updated version of the nineteenth century heartthrobs who populate Bella’s favorite books, books where an emotional happily-ever-after is fairly inseparable from an economic one. The Cullens’ country estate is a dead ringer for Pride and Prejudice’s Pemberley, right down to the river running through the tastefully forested grounds, and Edward’s resemblance to Mr. Darcy is no less exact, with overblown pride accounting for his bachelorhood in the imagination of onlookers like Jessica Stanley/ Miss Bingley, a first encounter that is personally offensive to Bella Swan/Elizabeth Bennet, and of course a brooding, anger-prone, justice-obsessed personality. It’s sometimes annoying that Elizabeth’s chutzpah doesn’t shine as forcefully through Bella, but it’s also possible that Bella’s passivity helps democratize the Pride and Prejudice vision, which could account for some of Twilight’s appeal. Jane Austen convinces us that a girl whose looks are only “tolerable” can land a man like Mr. Darcy if she has a personality to die for, but Stephanie Meyer extends the dream to girls who know that Elizabeth’s charisma is beyond them. Edward gets interested in Bella because she’s the exception to his mind-reading gift, which is a pretty apt metaphor for the way that normal couples fall in love when complementary personality quirks suffice to keep each other engaged and always guessing.

When Elizabeth marries Mr. Darcy and becomes mistress of Pemberley, the subtle, elusive compatibility of their souls effects a dramatic, corporeal change upon her life; I don’t think either Pride and Prejudice or the derivative Twilight is trying to use wealth as a “metaphor for spiritual superiority,” but as a metaphor for the way that the right kind of love can completely transform one’s existence. I think the scene quoted in Emily’s article was probably intended as a metaphor for the way that seeing yourself through the eyes of a lover can change the way you carry yourself until the whole world sees you differently– not a very original idea, but not hypocritical or shallow either.

The main reason I prefer Twilight to Harry Potter, notwithstanding its inferior prose, is that the love holding center stage in Harry Potter seems maddeningly circumstantial. There is little besides a bunch of shared near-death experiences that can explain why Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione pair off the way they do, and I’ve never spoken anyone who was less than moderately annoyed by Rowling’s sickeningly domestic epilogue. Bella and Edward’s love may be idealized and over-the-top, but I think that Meyer’s supernatural explanation of their compatibility is one of the best accounts of why people fall in love that I’ve ever read in a children’s book. It may be heavy-handed, but it seems like a pretty brilliant way of saying something meaningful about love that will be understandable to a twelve-year-old who doesn’t have the life experience to appreciate what’s going on in Anna Karenina or even Pride and Prejudice. I wish Stephanie Meyer had left out a few cringeworthy details like the misogynism of the werewolf world, but all things considered, I don’t feel ashamed for enjoying Twilight.

A thought-provoking post, Emily. I admit my “Twilight” experience mirrors many pleasure readers. I gobbled the four books in seven days, laughing out loud at the melodrama, rolling my eyes the cliché prose, and tsk-tsking the vampire materialism, werewolf misogyny and human (Bella’s) self-deprecation. But the fact remains, I read voraciously. I can’t deny my heart beat a little bit faster, and I couldn’t put the books down. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to the power of the story or a reflection of the salacious reader in all of us. I see the “Twilight” saga as being a bit like grocery store birthday cake. It’s not as refined as something from the gourmet bakery up the road but, hey, it’s cheap, easy to get, and tastes really, really good.

Julie Colombo’s daughter gave a very honest answer. Love story + hot guy + pretty girl = mass-market appeal. People are more willing to accept the absurd, the impractical, and even the destructive when it’s threaded together by dangerous, unconditional love. A theme that transcends literary generations.

I’m so interested in your ongoing vampire study. While we see an upsurge in vampire popularity today, this blood-thirsty, undead character has fascinated readers for centuries—particularly women readers. I’m curious what you dig up, Emily.

Thanks again for another well-written, insightful essay! I always enjoy your work.

I can think of no better way to honor both the man and his singular hero possessed of an “incurable wanderlust” and a “vocation for defeat” than by quoting the latter’s bathroom graffiti, bits of wisdom written by the Gaviero in his seclusion.

The performer's recital is lovely, and the lilt and cadence of her voice are mesmerizing. But then halfway through, something happens that gets me thinking about artistry and solipsism and the fallout of one marrying up with the other. What happens is: A giant fly begins to circle the performer’s face.